


A tireless messenger who runs

by gogollescent



Category: Ender's Game - All Media Types, Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 17:17:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of the puzzles in the game were more elaborate than anything she’d come across in Euclid. There was the Witch, for example, who made two cups of tea, and asked you to pick one; they were always poisoned. “Cantarella,” she’d say, while Utena’s avatar was writhing around on the floor of the hut. Or: “Mercury. The chemical, that is—though how you remind me of a fleetfooted young god!” Or: “Wouldn’t you like a little shaved ice with that?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A tireless messenger who runs

The fantasy game was  _so weird._ Utena knew she should be focusing on her schoolwork, but she was increasingly uncertain what tricked-up algebra had to do with killing aliens; or even with playfights and freeze tag. Okay, geometry was sort of relevant, if you were one of those whizzbang prodigies who could instantly calculate trajectories while bumping around in zero-g, but x and y in ever-changing configurations just made Utena think of the ancient porn vids they kept in the official Battle School library. She skipped the assignment. What were they going to do—fail her? Her, Ms. Humanity’s Only Hope?

And besides, some of the puzzles in the game were more elaborate than anything she’d come across in Euclid. There was the Witch, for example, who made two cups of tea, and asked you to pick one; they were always poisoned. “Cantarella,” she’d say, while Utena’s avatar was writhing around on the floor of the hut. Or: “Mercury. The chemical, that is—though how you remind me of a fleetfooted young god!” Or: “Wouldn’t you like a little shaved ice with that?”

Utena thought sometimes that it would be—almost too easy, to get around the Witch by refusing the refreshments; but she could never bring herself to say, no, I’m on a quest, I’ve got a princess to save, a species to vanquish, I am someone else’s only hope. To her, the Witch seemed lonely. Smooth movements, always: she would pour the tea and put cut flowers into the vase, no matter how Utena protested, like water running downhill despite all your childish wishing that it would rise up off the earth. How clearly she had imagined that, once—the fluted jet of water from the hose in her father’s garden, not flattening and fanning out to sink into the soil, but retaining its transparency, its beauty, and its form. Curving like a serpent, into the faded mist. She didn’t know what the equivalent would be for this programmed construct. Perhaps a smile. A pulse of laughter, not tinkling—as when the Witch bent over her dead avatar with an apology—but bitterly sincere.

Sometimes the poisons were slow-acting. She would leave the hut in her seven-league boots after exchanging polite farewells with her host, and stride off feeling accomplished, hopeful, renewed against all experience. She might make it as far as the wolf’s children, or the mockingbird with the violet eyes like tiny snaps of quartz. And then, before her eyes, her little pixellated form would wheeze, stagger, fall—its knees collapsing inward, its simplified mouth open to the shifting desktop sky. The screen’d black out. And on those occasions, she felt happy, or content in the unkindness of truth: there was never any chance that she would win.

…

Years later, as governor of the first human colony on a Formic world, Utena is far too busy for games. She has been poisoned a thousand times over; she can show no one her needle-forested heart, lest it put out their eyes. But when she finds the dueling tower, and the hut with its thickets of roses all around—roses sculpted from concrete, because the Buggers didn’t have any Earth seeds—then she feels the same terrible happiness, a discovery about her own shortcomings that could destroy the world.

She goes in through the door, hanging loose on its hinges. She tries the teacups, but they’re part of the table. She looks in the cupboards, and the wardrobe where the Witch kept fearsome animals; she tries to light the candles the Witch once blew out. Eventually, she decides to dig up the floor. She calls no one to help her. She gets a pain in her back, even though she’s only sixteen, but that’s what happens when you suddenly start doing hard labor on a planet with greater gravity than you’re used to. Sometimes, she has to push herself up on her knuckles, but that’s nothing, it’s nothing; stars winking out in the dark. The men she’s killed—the silent, fearful queens.

Finally, she manages to lever up the slab. There’s a dark chamber under it, and something glimmering, like a white eye. An egg. A flower, in the absence of light. That unbroken young shell.

"Himemiya," she says softly, tears filling her mouth, glazing her lips with water. "Anthy. We finally meet."


End file.
